Language Contact | Lee-Ann Vidal Covas, PhD

Filled pauses as a site of language contact among Spanish-speaking Bostonians

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

English/Spanish Contrastive Phonology & Filled Pauses

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Spanish in Boston Project

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have previously served as a Grad Assistant and Lab Manager for Dr. Daniel Erker in the Spanish in Boston Project, where I focused on transcribing and annotating sociolinguistic interviews related to various social and linguistic phenomena.

Currently, I continue to contribute to the project through data creation, extraction, and cleaning, as well as running statistical analyses and creating visualizations.

Covariation & Salience in Linguistic Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I investigate how the noticeability—or salience—of different linguistic features shapes how people use and adapt language in contexts of contact with other dialects and languages. Instead of analyzing features one by one, I look at how lower- and higher-salience features pattern together to understand when speakers converge toward another language, maintain their own patterns, or repurpose features as identity markers. This approach bridges morphosyntax, phonetics, and discourse, integrating reproducible annotation and quantitative modeling across multiple feature types.

Future work expands this framework by adding more higher-salience variables (e.g., intervocalic /d/ lenition, vowel lowering, prosodic “cantadito”) and by including new communities beyond Boston as well as additional national identity groups. By comparing both speech production and listener perception, I explore when bilingual speakers adapt for efficiency and when they preserve differences as a form of cultural expression.

Dissertation Research

Conducted as part of the Spanish in Boston Project (NSF BCS-1423840), my dissertation examines how lower- and higher-salience features co-vary in the speech of Puerto Rican and Dominican Bostonians. Using mixed-methods analysis, I show that lower-salience features—like subject-pronoun expression, subject placement, and filled pauses—tend to align with English-compatible patterns, while higher-salience features—such as coda /s/ and liquids (/r, ɾ, l/)—remain socially meaningful resources. The results demonstrate that salience—social as much as perceptual—explains which variables shift together and which persist as identity markers.

At a glance


Scope	Covariation across morphosyntax (pronouns, word order), discourse (filled pauses), and phonology (coda /s/, liquids)
Design	Sociolinguistic interviews from the Spanish in Boston Corpus plus metalinguistic commentary
Speakers	Puerto Rican and Dominican speakers (N=22, ≈24,197 tokens)
Methods	Acoustic analysis in Praat Mixed-effects modeling in R	Praat RStudio

Key findings

Lower-salience features show modest, systematic convergence with English norms (bilingual optimization).
Higher-salience features remain stable & socially indexed, marking national identity distinctions.
Salience is continuous and ideologically mediated, structuring which variables shift together and which become identity markers.

Filled Pauses & Language Contact in Boston Spanish

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When people speak, they often pause with short sounds like uh, ah, or eh while planning what to say next. These filled pauses keep the conversational floor and help listeners follow along—yet they vary across languages. English speakers tend to say uh/um, while Spanish speakers more often use eh/em. This project investigates how bilingual Spanish speakers in Boston use these tiny hesitation sounds, revealing how everyday speech encodes patterns of language contact and sound change.

At a glance


Design	Sociolinguistic interviews from the Spanish in Boston Corpus
Speakers	Spanish-speaking Bostonians (N=80, ≈6,364 tokens, 13 national origins)
Methods	Acoustic analysis in Praat Mixed-effects modeling in R	Praat RStudio
Predictors	Age of arrival, language use with interlocutors, and phonetic context
Variable	Vowel quality in filled pauses — fronted [e] (eh) vs. centralized [a]/[ə] (ah, uh)

Key findings

Speakers with greater English exposure (earlier arrival, more bilingual networks) favor centralized pauses ([a], [ə]), while Spanish-dominant speakers prefer [e].
Phonetic context plays little role — the pattern is socially, not structurally, driven.
The shift is conservative: bilinguals reorder pause-filling norms rather than adopting English-like forms wholesale.